Google Chrome

We think you're way too slow.

This was discussed in a previous thread. I haven't tried it yet. The Linux version has taken longer than I thought it would.

Quote:

Original post by Promit We think you're way too slow.

Yea, I did a quick skim of the first page to see if there was a thread or not. Guess its already 3 weeks old...

Quote:

Source: TechReport.com Google Chrome made quite an entry into the browser market earlier this month. Within days of Chrome's debut, NewsFactor reports, web watchdog Net Applications found that the browser already accounted for 1.4% of hits on 40,000 sites. This week, Chrome's market share is but a shadow of its former self at just 0.77%. The explanation for this change seems pretty straightforward. Many Internet Explorer and Firefox users became infatuated with the new browser upon its release, and now they're slowly switching back. Net Applications' data points to a gradual decrease, too, since it pegged Chrome's market share at 0.85% last week. For reference, the firm says Internet Explorer commands 72.15% of the market, Firefox has almost 20%, and Safari sits in third place with 6.37%. As NewsFactor points out, Google might have to work harder if it wants to snatch away IE and Firefox users for good. Just because Chrome performs well, has a neat user interface, and comes from a company like Google doesn't guarantee its success. Google does have a few tricks up its sleeve to draw in more users, though, like a Firefox-style add-on system and support for custom user scripts.

Seems Google still has some work to do...

No Ctrl-Shift-Back, no Ctrl-Back. Memory management doesn't seem to be significantly better than FireFox (it's better, it's just not what I was expecting from all those Google Ph.Ds; when I keep things open for a week (we're talking hundreds of tabs spread across a dozen Chrome windows), and I close all of them to keep just one EMPTY window open, that empty window consumes like 400MiB of memory, because Google Chromes memory management, whist being an improvement over FireFox (FireFox would keep ALL the memory referenced (> 2 GiB open)), is not the cure-all of browsers (at least for me). Opening new tabs seems to be blocking (think sockets), it will halt the browser for hundreds of milliseconds when there is a large quantity of tabs already open (>40). Basically, I'm alleging the "responsiveness" of Google Chrome sucks bollocks, just like IE7.

Google Chrome has improvements that make my browsing experience alot easier (for instance, it will not allow "Open in New Tab" for links that reference &#106avascript commands (Ph.D students are smart!), and its element inspector deserves a Nobel Prize in, erm, Chemistry!

But FireFox is still my #1! As IMO, it's the "least wrongly" (they are all coded in C++ afterall) coded browser.
FireFox -> Chrome -> Safari -> Opera -> Internet Explorer
And Market-Share is no way to compare browsers IMO. I have only few friends outside the class-room (all my fellow 4th Year Engineering students use FireFox) who know (or even care) of the existence of alternative browsers to IE7.

Edit: I almost forgot, Chrome's UI (with Aero enabled) is the pinnacle of interface design on Windows Vista; it's nothing short of brilliant! IE7 feels like some 3rd party software after using Chrome.

Double Edit: I don't mean to sound padantic or anything, but I don't think that each tab is on its own process; inspection of the processes list, and "about:memory" has me inclined to believe the each plugin type, and each domain name, and each element type has a process dedicated to it, but not each tab in general. [disturbed]

[Edited by - Thevenin on September 24, 2008 10:43:45 PM]

Meh, call me when it has AdBlockPlus... back to FF for me.

Quote:

Original post by ChaosEngine Meh, call me when it has AdBlockPlus... back to FF for me.

+1
As well as:
Better gmail 2
ubiquity
greasemonkey
etc.

Will be interesting to see what springs up once the new scripting/add in systems comes to fruition.

Quote:

Original post by Thevenin Edit: I almost forgot, Chrome's UI (with Aero enabled) is the pinnacle of interface design on Windows Vista; it's nothing short of brilliant! IE7 feels like some 3rd party software after using Chrome.

Although for some reason, closing the last tab closes the entire window. No other MDI/Tabbed application that I can think of does that. Also, I can only see about 20 characters of the page's title, because the title bar is blank and I have to go off the tab's title. It's not impossible to find it out, just annoying.

Quote:

Double Edit: I don't mean to sound padantic or anything, but I don't think that each tab is on its own process; inspection of the processes list, and "about:memory" has me inclined to believe the each plugin type, and each domain name, and each element type has a process dedicated to it, but not each tab in general. [disturbed]

Indeed. It uses a maximum of 20 processes. After that it starts randomly re-using existing processes, IIRC. Expect this behaviour to change^[1].

Quote:

Original post by _Sigma Quote: Source: TechReport.com As NewsFactor points out, Google might have to work harder if it wants to snatch away IE and Firefox users for good. Just because Chrome performs well, has a neat user interface, and comes from a company like Google doesn't guarantee its success. Google does have a few tricks up its sleeve to draw in more users, though, like a Firefox-style add-on system and support for custom user scripts. Seems Google still has some work to do...

Hardly surprising, really; it really does appear to be a feature-deprived Opera clone with only a process-per-tab model and private browsing mode (thank-you IE 8) as a notable difference. If Opera does poorly on the desktop, I don't see how an imitator will do any better, even if it is badged with Google's name. I reckon Firefox got it easy; at the time there weren't really any notable free browsers to compete with and it offered genuinely useful features to the masses (viz, tabbed browsing). A browser is going to have to do something really special to get users to switch these days.

Quote:

Original post by MrEvil Although for some reason, closing the last tab closes the entire window. No other MDI/Tabbed application that I can think of does that.

It really is criminal, its managed to catch me out a couple of times.

Quote:

Also, I can only see about 20 characters of the page's title, because the title bar is blank and I have to go off the tab's title. It's not impossible to find it out, just annoying.

Yeah you have to hover over the tab to find out - personally I don't think a real window title bar would be all that bad.

Quote:

Original post by benryves I reckon Firefox got it easy; at the time there weren't really any notable free browsers to compete with and it offered genuinely useful features to the masses (viz, tabbed browsing). A browser is going to have to do something really special to get users to switch these days.

I'm one of those people that just wants a nice, simple, easy to use browser with no cruft or hassle.

I was happy with IE but unfortunately it crashes a lot on my laptop: if a tab goes bad or it just runs out of memory then I lose it all and the rest of the time it's just slow.

I only use Firefox if I need specialist features, for the general case I don't have the desire to go hunting through addons in order to get the simple features like a 'New Tab' button - things that I expect it to have straight out the box. I also find it's smart address bar to be quite intrusive. Overlooking these things though it's actually not that bad.

So far Chrome is okay, it fulfils my expectations at least, it does everything I need from a browser and I can use it forever without running out of memory or crashing. It also has the nicest tab interface ever with cross-window tab dragging too. When I buy a new laptop, I'll probably switch back to IE though.

Chrome is also not only competting with IE7 and FF but the IE8 betas as well, and IE8 Beta 2 is my browser of choice thus far.

Even if it does sometimes do something confusing where Vista claims IE has crashed and yet the window/tabs remain responsive and even after clicking the 'close' button on the box which pops up the IE session continues along nicely. I think this only happens when I close a tab so I wonder if its doing something funky with tabs in the background.

Somewhere in that comic about chrome, google mentioned the reason for creating another browser: speeding up the browsing of the internets -> the peoples browse more -> profits for google.

Thus, if google can give firefox a kick in the butt and make it use their &#106avascript engine + the concurrency model, then the goal is achieved. This means it's not really a competitor perse. <br><br>Personally I'm glad they did it, or will be when those other browsers get improved as a consequence. It seems like browsers just keep getting slower and slower (yes, opera too), or perhaps that's just the general web 2.0 crap? Either way I hate it.

I ran with Google Chrome as the default browser for a couple of weeks (well, when on Windows anyway). However, it had some quirks with Facebook, where certain buttons wouldn't respond to clicks at all. There were some other minor, but annoying compatibility issues. Although they may not be Chrome's fault, it just doesn't compete with Firefox.

I really liked it's interface. All aspects of it. I think it's close to flawless. But some more settings (hidden somewhere far into those two menus) would be nice, and I find it hard to live without adblock plus, and the JS debugging tools are very processor hungry and doesn't reach the knees of Firebug.

I will try it again once it's no longer beta*.

* I'm only being semi-sarcastic here. I do hold some hope that it won't last more than half a year or so to get there, and not forever like ... any other Google product I guess.

Yay post bumping \o/

Anyway, this is mostly to confirm that IE8 Beta 2 also puts tabs into different processes, although I'm not sure how it splits them up as with 26 tabs open only 11 processes where running.

It looks to be one 'master' process and multiple slaves as even with one tab open there are still iexplore.exe *32 processes running on my machine.

So, one less reason to use Chrome and another to stick with IE8 [grin]

I've been using Chrome continuously since release day. And I'm goddamn tired of it.

Random loss of sound. Random loss of login cookies. Glitchy FLV playback, and ever glitchier playback of other files. If a tab crashes it can take down the whole browser despite all this process isolation stuff. Doesn't work with Facebook. Core UI glitches sometimes, and rendering randomly grinds to a halt (this one is baffling, where switching tabs takes 5+ seconds to re-render fully on a QX6800/4 GB system).

Maybe it will be better when they release an update. But right now, Chrome is shit.

Well it works great on my Windows XP Pro. I don't get crashes like other people are complaining about but...

The Only (2) things I can complain about is how if I'm playing a video from Youtube in one tab and then go to create another tab there's sometimes a 2 second video pause upon going to this new tab. It only happens once in a while though.

Besides that it would be nice if when I create a new windows with a tab(by dragging the tab outside of the current window) that it would allow me to re-size the tab with my scroll wheel before just before dropping the tab down. It annoys the hell out of me when you drop the tab down and its the same size it was before.

Google released Chrome way the hell too early. Sure, its nifty, but it pretty much just reminds me of one of those browsers you see on sites like PSCode - almost nothing to it.

Separate process per tab, can close tabs one-by-one by clicking the same spot, private browsing, fast, very quick opening/closing of the browser... is it just me, or does it looks like the Google boys are trying to whip out the ultimate porn browser? If so, that's a pretty smart idea, since porn sure is too inconvenient to get these days! No one wants a browser that is going to crash or bog down just because they have a measly 20-30 tabs open and streaming boobies.

Quote:

Original post by phantom Anyway, this is mostly to confirm that IE8 Beta 2 also puts tabs into different processes, although I'm not sure how it splits them up as with 26 tabs open only 11 processes where running.

For the record, IE8 Beta 1 did that too. [smile]

Yeah, I did some reading around it last night after I posted; from what I gathered they had improved it in Beta2 some what. I guess I just didn't notice until tabs started crashing but not taking the browser down with it [grin]